satellite cult 34.34

star virgin, blushi, icons, pre-1995 web

Jun 30, 2023

welcome to this week’s satellite cult dispatch. i’m so glad you’re here. i hope the artifacts i present you with will fill your mind with pulsing intrusive thoughts about Sanrio characters. you’re not a bad person if you have visions of yourself pushing Hello Kitty off the subway platform and into the path of an oncoming L train—that is, as long as you don’t act on it.

please be aware that the void dive section below contains flashing gifs. if you’re viewing this on the website, forgive the way Substack formats some Bandcamp embeds.

you can find satellite cult updates and memes on Instagram, and you can visit your cult leader’s Neocities page here.

i write and research satellite cult each week because i love it, and it’s important to me that it remains free to read and subscribe. but if you want to give altar offerings for the time and labor i invest, you can support me on Ko-fi.

if you enjoy what you find here, like, share, and consider subscribing to satellite cult.

Star Virgin III (Deluxe)

for the first time since 2019, サクラSAKURA-LEE has graced us with another installment of the Star Virgin releases. named after the 1988 cult classic tokusatsu camp-fest Star Virgin (read more about it here), this series of future funk EPs is a favorite among fans, so much so that the cassettes are already sold out. the latest doesn't disappoint.

SHAPE OF HEART, SHAPE OF HUMAN

these ambient barber beats by PERMANENT//ZEIMP are the image of bittersweet discovery, a melancholy revelation that inevitably changes everything for a kneeling figure on a grassy hill, gazing up into the heavens and searching for answers from an ancient deity. out on West Virginia-based label Doki Doki Beats, SHAPE OF HEART, SHAPE OF HUMAN will haunt you.

DREAM企業™

combining utopian virtual and eccojams with vaportrap and drum and bass, this experimental album by 汎用CAD leans pleasantly into some of the most abrasive corners of vaporwave, abandoning the comfortable for the unexpected.

THE EPSON SESSIONS I

a curious fusion of signalwave and noise, this choppy mess of dial up tones and printer noises mimics the sounds of a copy room. no, really. out on shitposting sonic meme factory What Explosions Do To The Body, Epson EcoTank ET-2800’s EP is oddly satisfying on the ears.

World's Greatest 2 Day Waterbed Sale!

out on net label Bogus Collective, this classic vapor by ホテル shampoo leans into late night lofi and even mallsoft; it’s 1991 and your parents are looking for a new mattress. this album follows you from seeing the ad on TV to the radio in the car ride to the mall, the walk to the mattress store through the skylight-illuminated concourse, the awkward moments standing around while your dad talks to the salesperson, the drive home after the purchase. it’s a suburban America that doesn’t exist anymore, which is both a blessing and a shame.

blushi

this isn’t the first time i’ve featured blushʕ ꈍᴥꈍʔ, and this album is sextrance-adjacent, heavily hexd beauty at its peak; sometimes droning, sometimes choppy, it moves fluidly between serenity and violence. blushi made me feel something.

Serenixima

out on GZ999, this album by CTRLFR33K pulses and flows, hitting hard as it can before pulling back into sweetness. ten tracks of pure sextrance, it’s the dark, undersea rave i’ve always dreamed of attending.

SEXDUIT WIFECORE

this might be the sweetest release i’ve ever featured that also goes this hard. a tribute to gay love and sex by notable sextrance producers and wives purity://filter and vertigoaway, SEXDUIT WIFECORE will make you gay and trans if you aren’t already, and if you are, you’ll ascend to got tier queer. sending this to my partner—brb.1

old internet icons

if you ever wondered what happened to all those icons people used on MySpace and LiveJournal, or just need some for SpaceHey or Dreamwidth, you should check out Old Internet Icons on Tumblr. it’s 2008core.

prehistoric pages

i hate to lean on Wikipedia instead of doing my own research, but this list of websites founded before 1995 says a lot about who was using the early net. i’m sure it’s not a complete list, and some, like CERN’s website, are obvious—even so, it’s interesting. here’s a site for audio tech and synth lovers, a site for bluegrass fans, and the Internet Underground Music Archive.

all of these websites predated whitehouse.gov, which didn’t go online until 1994.